3/18/13 6:15 PM EDT

Roger Ailes is no fan of CNN — and as Fox News' Shepard Smith puts it in the Fox News head's biography, “I wouldn't say he wants everyone over there dead, but it's close.”

Zev Chafets wrote in “Roger Ailes: Off Camera” — which POLITICO obtained an advance copy of before it hits bookshelves on Tuesday — that Smith “once told me that the only thing more important to Ailes than beating CNN is CNN losing to Fox.”

“I wouldn't say he wants everyone over there dead, but it's close,” Smith said, according to Chafets.

Chafets also shares an account of Ailes’ 72nd birthday, May 15, 2012, when Ailes received a “gift from his greatest rival.”

“CNN’s primetime shows registered their lowest ratings in fifteen years,” Chafets wrote. “in the nine o’clock hour, Hannity outpaced Piers Morgan in the key age democgraphic of twenty-five to fifty-four by almost ten to one. It was a victory of epic proportions, which Ailes, [wife] Beth, and [son] Zac celebrated with a homemade birthday cake.”